Welcome to Build and our Build 2017 review of day two! You can read our review of day one here: Microsoft Build 2017 Review of Day One – Azure News & Updates The theme of day two was all about love and engagement. New ways for developers to get their users to love their apps and increase engagement. Build 2017 Review …

Welcome to Build and our Build 2017 review of day one! You can read our review of day two here: Microsoft Build 2017 Review of Day Two – Windows News & Updates The day of course started with the normal cattle herd and a long wait to get into the keynote. Maybe it is just me, but there seems to …

Need help on how to monitor IIS? This guide covers how to cover the basics including HTTP ping checks, IIS Application Pools, and important Windows Performance Counters. We also take a look at how to use an application performance management system to simplify all of this and get more advanced IIS performance monitoring for ASP.NET applications. From Basics to Advanced …

Exceptions can cause big performance problems. One of the most important performance metrics to track about your application is “# of Exceps Thrown / Sec“. It is available via Windows Performance Counters under the category .NET CLR Exceptions. In this article we will talk about exceptions, how to monitor your exception rate and find the actual exceptions being thrown. Is …

Random numbers are used in a wide variety of software applications. Depending on what you are using random numbers for, you will need to decide which type to use. For a music jukebox, the accuracy is not very critical. For something like a lottery or slot machine, the random number generator must be extremely accurate. Read on to learn more …

The .NET Framework provides a couple built in ways to convert a C# string to int, or several other numeric datatypes. It is important that you do so in a way that does not throw potential exceptions. Unsafe Ways to Convert a C# String to Int You can use a couple built in methods, as shown below, to convert a …

What is an Unhandled Exception? An exception is a known type of error. An unhandled exception occurs when the application code does not properly handle exceptions. For example, When you try to open a file on disk, it is a common problem for the file to not exist. The .NET Framework will then throw a FileNotFoundException. This is a simple example …

Welcome to Stackify’s guide to C# exception handling. In this article we cover the following topics: Basics about C# Exceptions, including examples Common .NET Exceptions How to Create Your Own Custom C# Exception Types How to Find Hidden .NET Exceptions C# Exception Logging Best Practices What is an Exception? Exceptions are a type of error that occurs during the execution …

In a recent blog post, we talked about how C# and .NET are the next big thing. If you’re planning to code in C#, dependency injection is just one of many things you should know. Read on for a primer on dependency injection in C# so you can use it to your advantage in your next project. Definition of Dependency …

After many months of hard work, we are preparing to release the latest Retrace agent for Windows / .NET, and along with this release, there are some changes to how we will be releasing our agents in the future. Change Around Automatic Agent Updates We have listened to a lot of feedback from our user base, and combined with the …

One of our .NET background services running as an Azure Worker Role uses a lot of CPU and runs on a bunch of servers. I decided to spend some time today to see if I could troubleshoot high CPU usage in production. I documented how I went about solving the problem with ANTS and Process Hacker so hopefully, it could help others! …

When you think of Docker, you probably don’t think of .NET or Windows. There are a lot of good reasons to use Docker with ASP.NET. Check out our top 10 list of reasons to use Docker with .NET to see if Docker can help you! 1. Pre-Made Runtime Environment Generally, when you set up a server machine (or virtual machine), …

Last week, I had an urgent request from a client that we know well. They had an IIS app pool that was experiencing frequent crashes, and they couldn’t figure out why. Even though it fell out of the scope of Retrace, they thought we might be able to help. We love these sort of requests here, because it gives us …

If you have used .NET Core, you have probably battled with the new built-in .NET Core LoggerFactory which is in Microsoft.Extensions.Logging. It has created a lot of confusion around logging with ASP.NET Core. At Stackify, we have logging integrations for log4net, NLog, Serilog, and our direct API. We have a lot of experience with building logging appenders and libraries to work with various …

When ASP.NET Core was released, Microsoft and the .NET community decided to merge the functionality of MVC and Web API. This makes sense since the two have always been very similar. We went through the process of making an ASP.NET Core Web API with various scenarios and came up with these tips for anyone out there wanting to do the …

If you are getting started with ASP.NET Core, you are probably wondering what has changed with logging. In short, the answer is both nothing and everything. The common logging libraries you have always used with .NET still work. Microsoft does provide its own interface for logging with .NET Core and it uses it for .NET internals. In this article, we …

NLog is a very popular logging framework for .NET. It is second only to log4net in popularity but is much newer and has a few unique features. I recently also wrote a similar tutorial for log4net and after looking at them side by side, NLog has a lot of great features and advantages. 1. What is NLog? Why Should …

One of the most requested features by New Relic users is support for .NET Core. If you aren’t familiar with it, .NET Core is Microsoft’s newest version of the .NET framework that is leaner, faster, open source, and can even run on Linux. Does New Relic Support .NET Core? Not as of January 2017, a full year after …

Application Insights is Microsoft’s lightweight application performance monitoring service. I have collected a nice list of things that every developer should know. Including tips, key features, and limitations. 1. Make sure your app targets .NET 4.6, and .NET 2.0 is not supported There are some changes in the 4.6 version of the .NET framework that enables some additional data collection …

Prefix enables developers to easily see what their code is doing as they write and test their code, including SQL queries, HTTP calls, errors, logs, and much more. Prefix is most often used with web applications, but .NET Windows Services are also supported. This article discusses how to use Prefix with a Windows Service or console application. Learn more about …